“The men were defecating in the open like a defensive wall in front of the slum: making a line that no respectable human should cross. The wind wafted the stench of fresh shit towards me. I found a gap in the line of the defecators. They squatted there like stone statues”
“If I were making a country, Balram says I’d get the sewage pipes first, then democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer”
Amid cockroaches, call-centres, three-hundred-and-thirty-million gods(I didn’t know that..), slums, shopping malls, and crippling traffic jams, Balram comes to Delhi to see how the Tiger might escape his cage…
Of course there are so many beautiful things about India, but you wont find it here. Forget the sparkling white Taj Mahal, fine linen, the spiritual mysteries of the river Ganges and the exotic romanticism we have come to associate with this spice country in the far east.
For the next three days, I was totally spellbound by this piece of fine edge writing; wedged between sharp humor and the poignancy built into Balram’s character.
At first, the reader may feel sympathy for the untenable situation Balram finds himself in, but as the narrative unfolds the reader is alerted to the distinctly cold-hearted nature of Balram and his subsequent unforgivable act of violence.
During a funeral one gets a taste of Adiga’s brilliance as he introduces us to his dark charm when Balram laments;
“Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life – possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.”
Sitting under a fan and watching it slice through rays of his living room chandelier. He has made it! Balram tells the visiting Chinese premier “In the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India,”. These days there are two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.”
Whilst illustrating the wide social disparity between the rich and the poor in Indian society, Aravind Adiga exposes the ugly and metaphorically cannibalistic habits that those who refuse to acquiesce to the demands of a life working for the capitalist machine inevitably succumb to. With this image;
“Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting in each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench -the stench of terrified, feathered flesh.”
In the Fall by Albert Camus (highly recommended) “Death is solitary but servitude is collective”, however Balram is more specific whilst describing India
“A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude.”
Alas! you soon realize there’s no merit in being born honest or intelligent, just as one is surely no more responsible for being a criminal by nature than for being so through circumstances.
It’s often said; after a certain age every man is responsible for his face, and soon enough the personal account of Balram makes the immoral choices of both the rich and the poor seem more understandable; they are the result of disparity in wealth, not general human evil.
One moment Balram is caught in a “shithole” of a life and the next moment he is greasing elbows of police chiefs in Banglore and running a taxi company ferrying call center workers for blue chip companies.
But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of my review, because this is not your cliché rugs to riches story. It’s a delightful ride through the politics, economics, religion and the culture of a rising global power; a place where, we learn, the brutality of the modern city is compounded by that of age-old tradition.
Meet your next favorite book character Balram Halwai, the Indian ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur… murderer.
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